DESCRIZIONE

This book on Infectious Disease Informatics (IDI) and biosurveillance is intended to provide an integrated view of the current state of the art, identify technical and policy challenges and opportunities, and promote cross-disciplinary research with meaningful meshing-up of innovative applications and novel methods. Additionally, it looks at informatics-driven perspectives (e.g., information system design, data standards, computational aspects of biosurveillance algorithms, and system evaluation), and serves the practical purpose of communicating to the policy makers and practitioners recent research findings and case studies in IDI and biosurveillance. The book contains chapters from major researchers and research groups focusing on cutting-edge IDI technical and policy research and its application in biosurveillance. Chapters are grouped into three sections: Section I provides an overview of recent biosurveillance efforts and discusses the legal and policy structure related to IDI and biosurveillance efforts. It then focuses on IDI data sources, and related information collection, sharing, and dissemination issues including ethical considerations. Section II surveys various types of methods used to analyze IDI data for both public health and bioterrorism surveillance. Computational techniques covered include: text mining, time series analysis, methods to deal with multiple data streams, ensembles of surveillance methods, spatial analysis and visualization, social network analysis, and agent-based simulation. Section III examines IT and decision support for public health event response and bio-defense. Practical lessons learned in public health and biosurveillance system development, technology adoption, and syndromic surveillance for large events are also discussed. The goal of this book is to provide an understandable interdisciplinary IDI and biosurveillance reference either used as a standalone textbook or reference for students, researchers, and practitioners in public health, veterinary medicine, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy. Integrated Series in Information Systems (IS2) strives to publish scholarly work in the technical as well as the organizational side of the field. This series contains three sub-series including: expository and research monographs, integrative handbooks, and edited volumes, focusing on the state-of-the-art of application domains and/or reference disciplines, as related to information systems.